'We never heard her cry ...'

Gone Too Soon

A nurse handed Lee Stevens scrubs as his wife was rushed into surgery. He threw them on over his clothes while listening to the commotion through the hospital doors.

He felt terrified.

It all started around 5 a.m. March 5, 2010, when Jessica awoke and felt pain across her abdomen. The Mishawaka couple called their doctor, who told them to head to the emergency room to have it checked out.

The couple was 36 weeks pregnant with their first child.

Jessica spent the next few hours that Friday at Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center in Mishawaka hooked up to machines that monitored her contractions -- yes, she was having them -- as well as the baby's heartbeat. She was also hooked up to IV fluids because she was dehydrated.

Around 8 a.m., the nurse took them to a different room for a fetal ultrasound.

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"It started fine," Lee recalls. "We heard the heartbeat at the beginning, but we didn't see the baby move like they wanted. We thought she may just be sleeping. But they said something about getting Jess up and moving around."

So the Stevenses returned to their room, where the nurses started hooking Jessica back up to the monitors again around 9:15 a.m. But they had a tough time finding the baby's heartbeat.

So they tried a second monitor. No heartbeat.

"That's when my heart started to sink," Jessica said.

After a third monitor did not detect the beating of their baby's heart, Lee remembers the doctor's order that changed everything: "Get the baby out now."

When the doctor came out of surgery, he sat down beside Lee. The emergency cesarean section revealed Jessica's placenta had prematurely separated from her uterus, the doctor said.

A massive concealed abruption, which had probably happened within the hour, had deprived their baby of oxygen for about 12 minutes, he estimated.

They knew the baby had been alive when the abruption happened, because she swallowed blood, Lee said.

The medical team had resuscitated their daughter, but every organ in her body, every muscle had been damaged from the lack of oxygen. The doctor said she was being placed on life support and may live a only few minutes. Or she could live longer.

They just didn't know.

Lee was in shock, but he wanted to see his daughter. He wanted to see Emma.

"She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, especially after hearing what the doctor had just told me. It was our child. I just wanted to hear her cry and hold her and comfort her," Lee said.

Many family members had already arrived when Emma was baptized Friday in the hospital, the only home she would ever know.

Over the next few days, the family held a vigil at Emma's bedside.

She always had someone with her, night or day, whether it was Lee and Jessica, her grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins who visited the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit.

Lee described Emma opening and closing her eyes. From time to time, she looked like she was holding onto her feeding tube. Her toes would move.

"It gave you the impression that she was doing something, but she had no voluntary movement," Lee said sadly. "You would see little twitches, and she would almost react to our voices when we read to her. But it was all involuntary."

The doctors ran two electrocardiograms to see if Emma had brain activity, but she had been deprived of oxygen too long, they said.

She never cried. She never made a sound. She was very likely blind and deaf.

"You would see her do something and you wouldn't want to get your hopes up, but it was hard not to," Lee said. "But as time passed, it was becoming more and more clear that nothing would change."

The doctors told the Mishawaka couple they might very soon have to make a decision that no parent imagines having to face.

On Sunday, Jessica and Lee held Emma as the doctors took their daughter off the ventilator. "We sat there with bated breath," Jessica described, and they were elated to watch her breathe on her own.

But they understood the gravity of her condition. The couple had signed a do-not-resuscitate form.

"If something happened, it would be God's decision," Jessica said.

Even though the couple did not want to give up all hope, they decided to have their photos taken by a local photographer who volunteered with the Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep program. It provides remembrance photos for parents suffering the loss of a baby.

The photographer spent eight hours with the family on Sunday.

Every family member who wanted to hold Emma, held her over the next couple of days.

Jessica and Lee washed her and dressed her and held Emma's feeding tube. They rocked her and read to her.

On Wednesday, the couple was allowed to take Emma out of the unit and into their private room, so the family of three spent some private time together away from the constant hum of the machines. They tried to pack a lifetime of memories into just a few days.